Electronical Failures, Daily Work, Dreams

I think I’ve got the flu. It kinda sucks. I can’t concentrate on things.

My cell phone broke today (dead screen) I took it apart & got it working again, but I think I need to get my demos off of it before I lose them again like I did on my last phone. I tried taking my old phone apart to get the songs out again today (a little less worried about breaking it & more considering it a piece of trash than a couple months ago) & man, now I know why people don’t try to use phone bits for homebrew pedals & circuit bending – the circuits are the size of the leg of the circuits I try to make instruments with.

So taking the phone apart made me want to try to work on one of my malfunctioning optical theremin do-dads. I plugged it in & it worked fine except one link needing to be soddered. I was playing with it as the iron heated up & it just stopped working all over again. WTF? I need to try to work with it again at some point. Intermittent things drive me crazy.

So still on the weirdo music electronic slant I tried doing some stuff with my tape violin (which if you saw the couple of Small Life Form shows where I used it, it’s more visually interesting than sonically useful). I built what is sometimes referred to as a “tape map” by wrapping tape around a jewel case & then I made a thing by wrapping tape around a test tube. Maybe I need to record on the tape when it’s already mounted or something, but all I can do is get crappy noise (like when someone is scratching a record) out. I can use it to get some beat oriented things, but only around the quality of tapping a mic to get drum sounds. Maybe if I saw a video of someone using one properly it would make more sense to me. I think what I really need is a wide long piece of tape to be able to get anything resembling what I’m sonically after. I think also the real tape violin stuff was probably using reel-to-real tape heads instead of a walkman & that may make a difference as well.

I’m trying to come up with the title for the Remora album. I flipped through some books hoping something would jump out at me, but I had no luck. Then I flipped through some ten year old notebooks & I had no luck there, but I was surprised by the quality of some of the stories & the fact that I couldn’t remember writing most of the stories as a reader, much less a writer. In fact one of the stories for a moment I thought was written in someone else’s handwriting, but on further analysis was probably just written in a huge rush during a lunchbreak or something. I used to try to write three or four stories a day. Just a couple hundred words. I probably should start doing it again.

Last Night’s Dream:
There’s some kind of cancerous growth on the top of my right ear (but looking in the mirror I forget which side of the mirror I live in & for a moment I’m sure it’s my left ear). I don’t have anything else handy so I start hacking away at it with a dull buck knife. It rips the flesh more than cuts it & it’s bleeding even more than I expected. It’s bleeding enough I’m light headed, or maybe it’s just painful enough that I’m lightheaded. I drop the knife in the sink with my ear to clean up later & go to bed.